Elyon woke to the smell of cold bread and rain. For a moment he thought he had slept in the market again - a dream of cracked pavements and hawkers - until Jonah's low hum corrected him.
They were not in the alley where the boy lay. Jonah had brought him to a place the old man called the Lantern: a narrow house leaned against the spine of a hill, timber blackened by heat and salt, windows like watchful eyes. Inside, the room smelled of leather, dried herbs, and the faint clean tang of old pages. It was small. It had a kettle and three chairs. A shelf full of repaired maps and patched robes climbed the far wall like a spine.
"You sleep," Jonah said, handing him a cup of tea that tasted like bark and honey. "You do not eat. Answer: why?"
Elyon took the cup with hands that still hummed from the Codex's mark. His wrist bore that faint glow - a careful star in the flesh. He flexed his fingers and watched light thicken at the knuckles like morning on a window.
"Because I wanted to see if the words I said would mean anything," he said. "And because there is a ledger - names. My brother. I thought - maybe -"
Jonah let the sentence drop like an ember. "You act before you know the price," he said, not unkind. "That is both gift and curse. Here - first lesson."
He reached to the shelf and removed a strip of cloth embroidered with a single, folded rune. When he set it between them and wrapped it around Elyon's thinning wrist, it felt less like cloth and more like a promise. Jonah's hands were rough with work and old calluses; his voice was the kind of voice that could tell stories without spectacle and still make a child believe dragons were close.
"The Codex answers to truth and service," Jonah explained. "You read and speak; it replies. But it is not a blacksmith's furnace where you cast what you will. It is a well. You lower yourself and the well's voice lifts you by what you give. Our practices echo old things. We do not take lightly."
Elyon wanted to ask what they actually did - the rituals, the rules - but he found the words clumsy. Jonah read the question in his eyes and simply said, "Show me your kitchen hands."
Elyon blinked. "My what?"
"Your kitchen hands. The hands you use for serving. Have you ever cooked for a sick person? Mended a cloak? Cleaned a wound with no thought of reward?"
He thought of the boy's cough and the honey. He thought of a winter the Vane family could not afford salt; he had boiled seaweed into broth and watched his mother smile as if she had tasted rose. He nodded.
Jonah rose and walked to a low shelf. He returned with a bowl of water, a torch, and a flat stone. "First rite of the Lumen," he said. "We call it the Mirror. The Codex will reflect your truest need - not what you say you want. Stand with the dish, and speak aloud. Not a question. A confession. Say exactly who you are to yourself. The book taught you to say a name; now say a life."
Elyon set the bowl on the stone. The bowl's inside was dull and dark; when he leaned over it, his face looked small and tired. He remembered Godren's laugh as they chased the attic's sun between rafters, the way his brother had given him a rag doll when they had no toys. He said the things you only say when no one else would hear.
"I am Elyon Veyr," he said - the name Jonah had given him in the market, the name he had accepted like a coat. "I am the son who did not stop when they took my family's honor. I am the hand who takes what I can to keep others from freezing. I am the one who has learned how to hide fear. I am the one who does not confess to hope because hope gets taken."
The words tasted like iron at the back of his throat. He had not realized he felt them so loudly until the bowl shimmered. For a second, the water seemed to look back: not a reflection but a field of memory. Inside it, he saw a shadowed corridor, his mother's hands cupping his cheek, the evening Godren left to trade with a merchant and never returned. The image was not gentle. It did not soften; it clarified.
Jonah watched him with a small satisfaction. "You named truth. Truth is the first currency. The Codex will accept it."
A drop of water leapt from the bowl and struck Elyon's palm. It did not wet him. Instead, it burned lightly like a coin pressed to skin and left behind the warmth of a small sun. It was no miracle of crowds, only a private amendment: Elyon's body habitually felt lighter; his tired bones creaked less. The wound of the pyre that he had expected crawling in his ribs eased as a knot unloosed.
"You will find that each rite has a balance," Jonah said. "You will gain something that makes what you do possible. It will ask for something else. Today, the price is a piece of forgetfulness."
Elyon's mouth went dry. "Forgetfulness?"
"A memory given up so that another may be remembered." Jonah's voice was gentle but flat. "Not everything is taken. The Codex chooses what to prune. It will not steal intention, only the things that keep you from moving forward - the comforts you clutch to avoid change. This is why the Lumen cannot be purchased, and why it despises vanity. You give what you will not miss so that you may gain what you must have."
That night, Elyon lay on a pallet of rushes and tried to catalogue what the Codex had taken. The scent of roasted figs - the boyhood scent from the attic - simply would not come when he tried to conjure it. He could summon the shape of Godren's grin, the feel of the attic rafters, but the sweetness of figs was gone, as if its place in his pantry of memory had been cleared to make space.
It hurt more than he expected.
---
The next days were small and immense. Jonah took him into the city at dawn and showed him tasks that had nothing to do with grandeur. They spent hours washing the cobbles of a lane that stank of pig waste so minstrel feet could pass without wading in filth. They carried water for a widow who had once been a seamstress and now lived in a makeshift hut. They delivered a forgotten commission to a blind man who tuned lute strings in return for two bowls of stew.
Each service the pair performed left Elyon with a quiet satisfaction that tasted different from hunger - a roundness in his chest, like bread. After three days, the mark on his wrist pulsed and a second rune traced itself along his tendon. It was a thin, measured glyph, not like the flash of glory that the common crowd sought. Rather, it felt like a strengthening of hinge.
"You'll notice the Codex is patient," Jonah said as they sat in the Lantern after a day of work. "It rewards the small. Men look for fireworks; the Lumen gives muscle. Grow the muscle and the fireworks will come when you need them."
The first test arrived not in a blaze but in the soft panic of the late market. A merchant's cart had been tipped at the bridge - a wheel shattered - and more than a dozen crates lay scattered. A line of nobles' hunting dogs had sniffed at spilled meat; the crowd parted. The merchant cursed under his breath, and his family - a woman and two small daughters - stared at the ruined goods as if everything they had would be claimed by rain and thieves in hours.
"Help him," Jonah said.
Elyon moved on impulse: he set his shoulder under the axle and pushed. The wheel stuck. He felt the fatigue of a thousand nights living hungry - a bone-weariness - coil through him. He bent closer to the ground and listened to the Codex's small rhythms behind the mark on his wrist. In his mind a phrase came like a bell: Serve. Speak truth. Trust the work.
He spoke nothing aloud. He dug his toes into the mud and pushed with all the slow power that came from honest work. When the axle lipped free, the cart rolled half a pace then sank into soft ground. There was a moment - only a moment - where the world teetered on a balance. Elyon placed his palm on the cart's wheel and let the warmth of the Codex run through the wood as if it were seed into soil.
A gust of wind swelled and the wheel turned. Not miraculous, not supernatural by showman's standards; it was the lurch of a man who fit himself into the world and made the world answer.
A child in the crowd laughed. The merchant's wife pressed both palms to her mouth and wept. Jonah didn't clap. He simply watched with a quiet pride.
"Do not be reckless," Jonah murmured as they walked away. "We are not saviors in parade. We are servants. The Codex blessing will attract interest - both from those who would bless it and those who would seize it."
They had not gone two blocks when the shadow fell across them: a tall man in grey-cloth, the same woman Elyon had seen in the market during Chapter 1 moments. Her face was sharper now; she had a ledger folded in one hand and a signet of the Covenant at her throat. She did not speak, only watched, and then moved like a predator that does not hurry.
"She recognizes the mark," Jonah said quietly. "You were not careful enough."
Elyon's pulse thudded. "What will she do?"
"Report," Jonah answered. "She will say a Vane - a betrayed man - works with an old keeper. She will file it. The Covenant will send a team if they sniff something. Tonight - we move the Codex. We do not let the book be taken."
"Taken?" Elyon said. "But the Codex chose me."
"So the Covenant says," Jonah replied. "And that is a dangerous song. If the Covenant believes a Codex exists outside their vault, they will move to secure it. They have men for that." He inclined his head toward the woman, who had already melted into the crowd, tight as a seam. "We must be ready when teeth meet light."
As they spilled back into alleys and the Lantern drew its shutters, Elyon felt the pulse of the Codex like a slow drum under his ribs. It gave him steadiness and found small holes in his resolve. He realized that being chosen meant more than lessons: it meant a target.
That night, before sleep could claim him, Elyon looked at the book Jonah had shown from the shelf - a worn ledger that held pages of older keepers, signatures, and small, dry notes. Jonah had explained, sparingly, that the keepers were a scattered network, some living as carpenters and seamstresses by day and as guardians of light by night. They did not seek glory. They mended things that the Covenant broke.
Elyon felt the shape of a larger life tighten around him like a cloak. He wanted to say he was ready. He wanted to believe it. But under the cover of his breath, he mumbled the one small prayer the Codex had given him to learn: not a prayer for power but for perseverance.
"Lumen, shape my hands," he said softly, and felt the rune on his wrist warm as if someone had set an ember in his palm.
Outside the Lantern, in the wet arteries of the city, the grey-cloaked woman met the Covenant man she answered to. He examined his ledger, then tilted his head like a predator assessing prey.
"She was seen," the woman said. "A man in a keeper's satchel with the boy's healer. He looks like a Vane. They will be easy to find."
The man glanced at the ledger and scribbled. "Not enough yet. Watch. If the light shows again, we pull."
Back in the Lantern, a shelf creaked as if the house itself leaned closer. Elyon held the moment between his hands - the small gain, the small mean. He had mended a cart; he had warmed a boy's breath. He had been chosen. The Codex pulsed in answer: Pay what is asked, and stand ready.
At the edge of sleep he saw a figure standing on a ridge under a thin moon: a woman with hair like loose wheat and eyes like a bell. She was not real in the way the market hawkers were real; she was a memory of a path not yet walked, a possible future that warmed his chest and made him ache at once.
Her face was almost forgotten - but not gone. Elyon blinked and felt the Codex's margin throb.
Tomorrow the Covenant would listen. Tomorrow he would be taught to hide the light and make it small. Tomorrow he would have to choose between doing what comfort had taught him and what the Codex required.
The sound at the Lantern's door - a deliberate knock, three slow beats - made him sit up.
Jonah's voice, steady like an oar, said, "Who is there?"
A pause. Then a voice from stone and ledger, clipped, legal as a verdict: "Representatives of the Covenant. We come for inquiries."
Elyon's heart narrowed to the thickness of a coin.
He had wished for a path. He had not expected the world to arrive so soon to take it away.
The Codex in his satchel thrummed against the wood as if hearing its name called in a roomful of hungry mouths.
Elyon reached for his wrist, felt the rune burn, and for the first time since the book had chosen him, he wished he had never answered.